Wednesday, 1 September 2010

I don't know, you wait ages to get something published and then two successes come along at once*.

My short story Seek Alternative Route is published over in Issue 2 of lit. mag. Spilling Ink Review today. It's the tale of two men from different worlds who meet in a traffic jam and find they have more in common than they imagined. No aliens, zombies or wizards are involved. Weird, I know. Here's a brief excerpt :

Up ahead, a suit had got out of a silver Mercedes and was gesturing at the traffic as if the whole thing had been staged to inconvenience him. He would have been powerfully built once, a rugby-player type, but now the curve of his belly protruded farther than his chest. Heart-attack shape. Pig grinned. The Merc had a personalized number plate, NE1L 3, the 1 written so that it looked like the letter I. Wanker. Did it rankle with him that he couldn’t afford NE1L 2 or NE1L 1? He had cruised by a mile or two back. Now they were almost together. It felt like a victory of sorts.

You can read the full shebang here, along with all the other damn fine fiction, poetry and nonfiction in the issue.

Meanwhile, over in Electric Spec, my SF short story Remembrance Day also sees the light of day today. They describe the piece as an "emotional military" tale, which I guess sums it up although I wasn't aware it was particularly military - nor even particularly emotional - when I wrote it. I think it's a story about identity, but who am I to say? Aliens definitely are involved in this one. Here's a taster :

He returned the gun to its place behind the bar. He kept an assortment of weaponry there but usually the zapper was enough. When he looked up she was standing at the bar in front of him.
‘Hi, Mag.’
Up close, she looked good. In fact she looked fantastic. Time had been hard on him, he knew. Time and war. She stood tall and unblemished. Her eyes, her lips, the cut of her hair all finely-featured, all perfect. By contrast, he felt like he was lashed together from slabs of rough metal. Her smile cut right into him, effortlessly deeper and sharper than the Martian’s knife.
‘Drink?’ he asked.

There are five other stories in the edition, ranging from fantasy to SF, along with an interview with Urban Fantasy author Jeanne Stein. You can read it in all its glory here.

Days like this make all the rejection, all the banging your head against the walls of indifference, all the crap involved in being a writer worthwhile. A good day here at Spellmaking Towers.

* This is a joke about buses that readers in the UK will understand. Apologies if it doesn't translate to your locale.

#1 may not be about aliens, but it's fun to note how alien UK slang sounds to Americans. Lots of things in that paragraph that need a bit of translation. For example--in the US a "Merc" is a Mercury--an old clunker. When I first got to the UK, I couldn't figure out why my editor kept bragging about his "Merc" so proudly.